Keynote: Disaggregated Memory and the Revival of Memory Research

Emerging hardware technologies bring exciting new capabilities and challenges to our research menu. One such technology is disaggregated memory. While its roots date back to the early 1990s, it is only now that this technology is getting rolled out. Disaggregated memory allows servers in a data center to share a memory that is externally connected. This form of sharing differs conceptually from traditional shared memory in many ways: performance, fault model, coherence, and the ability to communicate with other mechanisms. These differences open up new applications and research questions on how to best use this memory effectively. In this talk, we explore some recent and ongoing work in this area.